QA continues, and I feel like I've done nothing else for
the past few weeks. Apart from a recent (rather
discouraging) mass filing of serious bugs, the countdoes seem to be coming down - but damn, it's a long
tunnel and I can't really see the light at the end yet.
Fortunately, my general feeling is that several more people
are going through the list on a routine basis than before.

I've taken work on my own packages down to a fairly low
priority, which is why my one remaining nasty
bug is still unfixed. Sometimes it's scary how long it
can take to review a patch properly.

Work

Ups and downs. Two people I like and respect have decided
to jump ship recently. I won't go into the details here, but
suffice to say they made me half-contemplate following them.
On the other hand, my pet project (wish I could link to it
...) is on the company strategy, and I do enjoy my work much
more than I used to - which in the current climate is not
something to be sniffed at.

I still turn green with envy at the people being paid to
hack on free software. :-)

Life

"Ticking over" is about all I can say. I don't feel as if
anything particularly exciting has happened for ages, and I
can't feel motivated to do anything much about that either.
(That said, a local club that a lot of us go to is reopening
tomorrow, which always helps.) Maybe the fact that I have no
time is something to do with that. Sometimes I wish I was
committed to fewer free software things: it's rewarding, but
it really does chew up an enormous amount of time, and I
doubt it's doing my social life much good.

Oh yes - the importance of vacations. Many companies
insist that you take the time off that's allotted to you.
Should we strongly encourage people in volunteer projects to
take breaks? By the very nature of volunteering, people tend
to forget to stop occasionally, and it contributes to good
people burning out. For my part, I think I'll bring my
involvement down to a minimum for a month or two after woody
is released, just to unwind and relax.

I was reminded of an old flame recently. That
relationship has been definitely over for a long time, for
various reasons, but I still seem to love her. Bah. I should
really learn to be better at letting go - it would make
the inside of my head a much more comfortable place to be.

Mumble. Before that, though, I should stop rambling in
diary entries and get some sleep. 4am approaches ...

Like half the rest of the world, it seems, I went to see
"The Lord of the Rings" last night. Half-expecting the magic
to have been ripped out of it in the making of the film, I
was very pleasantly surprised. It's not often I see
something that could be put into the blockbuster category
for sheer spectacle and still manage to capture the spirit
of the book it was founded on so well.

I must re-read it over Christmas. How long do I have to
wait for the second film again?

Today a crowd of us from work went skiing and
snowboarding. I hadn't done either before, and opted for
skiing. Wow. I know what people see in it now.

Not much to speak of on the free software front; seasonal
shopping, parties, and general madness have been taking up
most of my time. Several things are going to need doing
early next year, mainly a new man-db release, and then I
hope to throw myself back into Debian QA work. We've
got to release woody soon, and it would be kind of
nice to freeze for woody+1 not long afterwards so that we
don't have another 18-month lag. I suppose I should go and
work on debian-installer if I want that to happen.

Ian Jackson has some interesting ideas to help speed up
the Debian release process, although I'm not yet sure if I
agree that he's trying to solve the right problem. I suppose
Debian has adapted to the testing distribution well enough,
so it's possible to experiment, although we really need one
quick release before it's politically possible to fiddle
with the process any more.

I had an excellent weekend visiting my ex-girlfriend (as
just a friend, before you ask!), and spent a while in the
pub last night catching up with a net.acquaintance I hadn't
seen in two years or so. We had the scariest conversation
where we discovered we knew a lot of the same people through
entirely independent routes, and he filled me in on loads of
things that happened to me and that never made sense at the
time. It's true, I'm convinced: there are only six different
people in the world. They're just all very busy.

Somehow this all fitted in rather well with reading some
more of The Illuminatus! Trilogy on the way
back home on the train. I'm not sure yet whether I'm missing
the point when I think bits of it make a lot of sense. If
somebody tells you you should be paranoid about everyone, do
you trust them?

We had a small Debian
UK meeting last night. Rather quiet - just a few people
who were coming up to Cambridge for university interviews,
the usual Cambridge geek crew, and a few others who could
make it here on short notice. Still, there were some people
I hadn't met before who with any luck will get more involved
in the future.

Ripped out large chunks of man's logic and
started replacing it with code that doesn't date from 1994
and that might actually be maintainable (then again, that's
pretty much the story of my work on man so far). All this so
that case-insensitive lookups will work.

My bug count seems to be climbing again, as I can't make
any more changes to stuff in Debian base until Anthony
pushes the magic button to branch off that bit of woody. I'm
still not fully convinced that I understand how the
branching is going to work with the new staged freeze, but I
suppose it should be OK as long as nobody screws with shared
library dependencies in unstable/base after the branch.

Well, I was less drunk, at least to the extent that I
remember how I got home. :)

Went through a bunch of LDP documents this morning and
got the free count up even more than I'd hoped. I think that
if we give the benefit of the doubt to various documents we
can have over 75% of the HOWTOs in main. The situation looks
a lot brighter than it did a couple of days ago.

I spent most of last night and today getting flamed
on Slashdot over the news that a lot of the LDP
documents aren't DFSG-free and so the Debian doc-linux
package, which I maintain, will have to be split into main
and non-free portions. Naturally all the Slashmonkeys jumped
on this, probably not helped by the exaggeration of the
deadlines involved in the story itself. I've given up
wasting my time trying to correct people's misconceptions
and plain lies - the code is going to be enough work as it
is.

On the upside, licensing debacles like this usually cause
a few more people to pick free licences. And it actually
turns out that the problem isn't as bad as we first thought
it was: newer versions of the LDPL are free, which probably
puts another 15% or so of the HOWTO collection into main.
Work progresses on trying to decide what goes where.

We have a Christmas party at work (paid work, that is)
tonight. Wonder if I'll be any less drunk than I was by the
end of last year's?

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